


XP for the Clown

by May



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 22:00:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The pile of clown is a livid purple and he won’t stop moving and he won’t shut up. He’s not walked and he’s not talked, but not a second goes by without a shudder or a wheeze. He offers a wet background rattle as you hit the keys to speak to your new antagonist. There must be some way that allows you to make him stop, to make him drip out the last of that nasty purple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	XP for the Clown

**Author's Note:**

> "How much experience do I get for the bard?" - Gary/Luster, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.
> 
> I put Meta-Hussie's words in bold in order to make them stand out.

The old Earth is static in the medium. The horizons are grey and the sky is starless and black except for dead, clouded Skaia sitting on the edge of the eyeline. The pile of clown is a livid purple and he won’t stop moving and he won’t shut up. He’s not walked and he’s not talked, but not a second goes by without a shudder or a wheeze. He offers a wet background rattle as you hit the keys to speak to your new antagonist. There must be some way that allows you to make him stop, to make him drip out the last of that nasty purple.  
  
**Talk to him.**  
  
You are not going to offer that pile of useless troll flesh the effort of communication. He probably couldn’t give you a good conversation if he was upright. Trolls aren’t useful. Trolls are stupid.  
  
NO  
  
You tighten your grip on the crowbar you’re holding. It’s got a good weight to it, you think –when you swing it, you can feel that weight smack hard into the side of the clown’s face. His head snaps round and you almost think you might have hit him so hard that you’ve broken his neck. His head swivels back round to look at you, though, still pretty upright. His face is swollen under his paint, which is starting to smear on top, and it’s a glistening purple underneath. His expression seems to be stuck in that constant grin, and you don’t seem to be able to permanently remove it, no matter what you do. It’s unconditional, it’s indulgent, and you don’t like it.  
  
He’s just as irritating in a bloody, coagulating heap as he was standing upright with no holes in his torso, at all. Since it levels out about equal, you’d rather he be a bloody mess. You find that the crook of your crowbar fits just under his chin, right behind the bone of his jaw. He grins up at you, still, even as blood trickles down the column of his throat, his yellow eyes glazed. You kind of want to just watch the purple ooze out of him and think about how much you hate him. Even that seems to be its own weird source of irritation for you.  
  
DO I GET SOMETHING. IF I FIND A WAY TO MAKE HIM DEAD?  
  
You hook the tip of the crowbar in the front of his shirt and it rips open with a soft zipping sound. There, in his torso, you’ve made holes rimmed with purple beneath the skin even after he’s stopped bleeding. In places, a bullet has got caught in his flesh and you can see the tip or the edge of a base showing itself even as it’s embedded, there. He’s the first person you’ve ever seen, and you love the crowbar so much, even if just for the way that you can feel the weight of him separating when you snag it on his stomach.  
  
**I doubt the game likes you that much.**  
  
The clown’s colour of purple offends you. It’s so stupidly ridiculous, like something Calliope would have come up with. And it’s dripping from the split skin of his belly. He’s shivering and his eyes are blank and leaking that same noxious colour and you can’t get over the fact that that’s a thing that you’ve done with your own hands, clutching your own weapon. He’s your first little pile of destruction, you realise.  
  
CAN I GET ANYTHING. FROM JUST CAUSING HIM PAIN?  
  
And, yet, he won’t stop smiling at you like that. Like, for some reason, he doesn’t care what you do. You haven’t known that many people, but they’ve always cared what you did. It seems unfair that the first time you make somebody’s blood spatter in person and he doesn’t die or even care about it. He just lies there and emits a sickly, haphazard rumbling noise.  
  
**You get the satisfaction of having made the clown bleed. That would be good enough for most people.**  
  
He won’t take his eyes off of you, either, but never in a way that’s sizing you up as any kind of challenger. You can’t identify how he’s looking at you, but something about it bothers you on a deep, intrinsic level that you would find difficult to explain if you ever even wanted to. They aren’t just glazed and wet, they’re also heavy lidded and clouded, with purple veining through his grey irises. You wonder if those really are the sort of eyes that Calliope would have spent entire paragraphs describing.  
  
The clown pulls himself up into a shaky crouch, and parts of him seem to further liquidize and leak out as he does so. He’s still making that noise from some place inside him that you’ve turned to mush that his body is trying to carry on using, anyway. He puts one of his skinny, knobbly-knuckled paws on your arm and you recoil but not enough that his other hand can't reach up to brush your cheek. There is something about this that bothers you more deeply than anything else he’s done. His skin is smooth and it’s too weird and alien and the only good thing about it is that it splits open so cleanly. He doesn’t have rough, scaly cherub skin, like you do. Even the skin that some of the humans have kinda looks like it would bristle if you touched it.  
  
The clown continues to stare at you, beatifically, still making that same liquid-rattle.  
  
WHY DOES HE KEEP MAKING THAT NOISE?  
  
You grab the clown by his horn and wrench his head harshly to the side. He screws his face up in a wince and you think that you could pull that horn straight out of his scalp, if you wanted. You won’t, though, not yet. They’re long and twisted upwards into points and you have to admit that they’re actually pretty nice. You might not want to break them, yet, but you do pull him up by one of them. You are almost face to face with him and it does seem to be that you are hurting him quite a lot.  
  
But he, resiliently, continues to make that noise, like it’s something he’s determined to do.  
  
**Some kind of weird basic troll communicative method, I guess. Even though you’ve pureed his insides, he wants to tell you that he loves you.**  
  
**As for what it is, I don’t know, he probably calls it his hum-box or something.**

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the first bonus round for the HSWC (quotes).


End file.
